State Department Is Trying To Make A Thousand Ushahidis Bloom

When the earthquake decimated Haiti last year, technologists around the world converged online to develop tools to help rescuers find victims and raise funds. Now the State Department wants to see if it can take that impulse and put it to work helping grassroots organizations tackle humanitarian problems around the world even when there isn't a horrible disaster to deal with.

To do that, the State Department is convening a series of “TechCamps” in different parts of the globe this year to bring together non-governmental organizations that know the problems, with technology experts who might have innovative ideas about how to tackle them.

“We saw the ability of digital natives and the networked world, using lightweight and easily iterated tools, to do something rapidly that a big organization or government would find difficult, if not impossible, to do,” Richard Boly, the State Department’s director of eDiplomacy, tells Fast Company. “The question is: Can we get that same magic to happen when people aren’t dying?”